FIFA 20 news is starting to flood in thick and fast. FIFA 20 will be released on the Xbox One, PC, PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo Switch this year September 27th.
FIFA 19 saw a huge overhaul of Career Mode’s presentation, but under the glossy shell very little had been changed.
This year’s game offers the perfect opportunity to focus on this.
Something that is coming more common in real life football, deals being agreed outside of transfer windows, with players joining their new clubs the following season.
The player-manager feature was arguably better than the other two career mode options, with you being allowed to both manage the team and have your star man on the field. It is a rarity in real life, but that didn’t matter when you were bending in free kicks with your player and making tactical adjustments.
Players asking you to review wages
In older FIFA games (FIFA 12 and FIFA 13) players used to send you – the manager – a message asking for a review of their current salary. This would happen if the player had been performing very well consistently.
Adjust ticket prices
This addition allowing you to make ticket prices super low or very expensive. Obviously, this would have a huge impact on attendance – but it was also related to performance. Should your team be performing well, they’d be a surplus of fans who would pay top dollar to watch them play. If you’re struggling, on the other hand, it would be harder to attract crowds and so reducing the price of tickets would act as an incentive for attendance. It also affects your total budget – allowing you to spend more money on top players.
Add a Club Creator mode
This would be amazing – imagine being able to create your own club. You’d have complete control over everything – kit design, ticket sales and staff and player wellbeing. One fan, Futmentor, has even drafted up how the menu would look.
However, Career Mode needs some new features to breathe freshness into those old bones. Here are 10 improvements we want to see in Career Mode.
Realistic Fixture Scheduling
The poor boss in the picture has a Championship clash with Bolton and a crunch Europa League game with Fenerbahçe within the span of just 24 hours.
Real teams aren't expected to play back-to-back matches across two days. Unfortunately, it's an all-too-familiar problem for anyone who has spent a few years powering through Career Mode. Eventually, you're gonna' run into this scenario, and it's murder on the legs of your team.
More realistic calendar algorithms are needed. It should not be impossible for the CPU to figure out how to juggle deep cup runs without punishing the player for doing well.
Actual Press Conferences
Those pointless pre-match Press Conferences (if they can even be called that) have got to go. Now, there's a chance choosing 'Praise', 'Unnerve' or 'Motivate' does have a subtle impact on your team, and it would add a new layer to the gameplay if they did, but they're so utterly skippable. In fact, we only do them out of habit at this point.
Imagine that, "narrative". Other sports games like NBA 2K19 have it by the bucket, so why is football left out all the time? The real-life game has become a soap opera anyway, making this even less forgiveable. Genuine press events, whether to deal with misfiring strikers, unhappy players or to let the papers grill managers, are needed.
A sluggish system that relies on players making up their own stories doesn't cut it these days. We want questions that offer context, immersiveness and add fun to the Career Mode experience.
An Enhanced Deadline Day
We're not expecting to see Jim White prancing about the place shouting about how the transfer window is only open for another nine hours, but the 'Deadline Day' package in FIFA 20 could do with a rethink. EA's designers must be aware of Sky Sports' coverage as the clock ticks down, and they should be offering that same level of unpredictability and entertainment.
Proper Simulation
The scoreline above is actually a respectable one for Arsenal. Losing 2-1 away to Barca in the Champions League last 16 isn't bad, and there's a chance the 'Gunners' could claw things back in the second leg. Better play that one, because simming it is dicing with death.
In 20, we demand more control over simmed matches. Being able to jump in and play at any point (like in Madden) would be great, and so would actually being able to tweak tactics as the match was in progress.
Hands-On Training
Training in general could do with some spring cleaning. There's a lack of depth to assistant manager reports on how players are performing, and it's weird we can only train up to five players at a time rather than looking after the entire squad. The game pretends star players like Neymar, Messi and others don't train.
On top of that, why haven't EA added in the ability to retrain a player's position? If you've got a glut of wingers and want to retrain one to play more defensively at wing back, that should be possible.
Playable Player Scouting
instead of relying on yo-yoing reports from scouts that deal more with player potential than what skills they have now, it'd be nice to assume control of a player for a training game to see how they play first hand. That makes way more sense, and it wouldn't be hard to carry out for EA.
It's time EA started making scouting less about chance and more about informed decision-making.
Club Objectives That Actually Matter
Clubs who want investment in 'Youth Development' will ignore their demands if you deliver trophies. This makes sense to a point, but it undermines the purpose of placing such importance on set goals in the first place. Trust us, it is very difficult to get sacked in FIFA 19 unless you're deliberately trying to do so.
This renders objectives meaningless, and we'd like to see that change. They should be there for a reason instead of as attempts at adding depth without actually adding it. There must be more emphasis on what the board wants.
Create-A-Manager
Those pre-set avatars were a nice touch when they first (literally) showed face, but they're tiresome nowadays. When polled, we find it hard to believe that most Career Mode players would rather pick Arsène Wenger's lookalike at the bottom right there than build their own model from the ground up.
It wouldn't only be creating ourselves that'd be thrilling either. The thought of crafting picture-perfect replicas of former players we want to see manage certain clubs would add way more merriment to the mode than currently exists.
Be A Real Manager
Imagine, instead of managing like Pep, you could be Pep.
Why not? It's entirely possible to control global stars like Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi and Harry Kane, and players can already decide their fates. In a feature dubbed 'Career Mode', shouldn't it be possible to take over the brain of real managers and work to their lofty standards or potential?
Sure, it'd take a bit of work for EA to add in different strengths and weaknesses for each one, but it's not outlandish to suggest they could make it happen.
Other Managers Move Clubs Too
Managers should move around like players in FIFA's game world. Obviously, some realism would be required here. We're not suggesting that Pep suddenly ditch City for Man Utd, or take a wild punt at managing Norwich, but there should be some movement. It'd keep things relatively fresh, at least aesthetically.
This could run alongside new storylines in Career and would make switching jobs more convincing.
